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Macmillan Cancer Support

Understanding how to deliver Macmillan’s support videos to people affected by cancer

Macmillan Cancer Support provides physical, emotional and financial support for people affected by cancer. Macmillan approached Fluent to help it understand whether its video content was easy to find, and how and when it was most valuable to people.

The challenge

People at different stages of cancer diagnosis have very specific information needs. Our research aimed to capture variations in the way that people look for information depending on their relationship with, or stage of, cancer.

Our greatest challenges were trying to understand all the different points in people’s journeys that these videos would be useful, and to understand how we could best deliver such sensitive information. A key question was how to deliver this information: through doctors, regular case studies from people affected by cancer, or from support staff?

What we did

We ran two rounds of research with users at our studios. The first round of research was aimed at understanding how and when people affected by cancer look for information. Our insights from the first round of research helped us analyse and visualise the ideal path for users to find video content which in turn informed the improvements that could be made for the next round of testing.

For the second round of research, the web team at Macmillan created four static wireframes for new ‘hub pages’ for each cancer type using the insights we provided from the first round of research. They wanted us to talk to people to understand specifically what type of video content would be most useful on these pages and where in their information-gathering journey these would be most useful and why.

The outcome

The research gave us an in-depth insight into what video content people preferred, which presentation was most effective and who they preferred to deliver this content. Their needs varied depending on the type of advice they were looking for, which was largely influenced by the stage of diagnosis and treatment they were at.

One of the key findings was the lack of awareness from users of video support. Based on our insights, we provided recommendations on how to make video content easier to find through changes in information architecture and labelling that mirrored mental models of people we spoke to. We also provided evidence for when in the journey people wanted to see certain types of content.